Reading the colors
Each scene is one strip, and the color tells you at a glance what kind of work it is. Most boards use this key:
| Color | Scene type |
|---|---|
| White | INT. day |
| Yellow | EXT. day |
| Blue | INT. night |
| Green | EXT. night |
| Black | Day break (end of a shoot day) |
| Other (often orange, red, or gray) | Banner strips for notes, moves, holidays |
A week with a long run of green strips tells you right away it is a night exterior week and that turnaround will need attention. The stripboard color legend covers the variations you will see on different shows.
How a board gets built and shuffled
The 1st AD starts with strips in script order and then sorts. A typical first pass groups everything by location, then by day or night within each location, then by cast. Say the fictional feature THE LONG DRIVE has 14 scenes at Rosie's Diner totaling 11 4/8 pages. At roughly 4 to 5 pages a day, that is three shoot days at the diner. The AD then checks those three days against the actor playing Joe, who is only available Tuesday through Thursday of week 2, and moves strips until his days line up.
A day break strip goes between days and carries the day number and total pages. A banner strip marks things like "COMPANY MOVE TO STAGE 4" or "WEEKEND".
Common confusions
"Stripboard" and "production board" get used interchangeably. Strictly, the production board is the physical frame that held the strips plus the header listing cast and element numbers. People also mix up the stripboard and the shooting schedule: the board is the working tool, the schedule is the printed output.
A frequent mistake on a first board is ignoring what the colors are telling you. If a day has a yellow strip scheduled after three blue ones, you are asking for exterior daylight after a night interior, which doesn't work unless a split day is planned.
What reads from it
The one-liner, the long-form shooting schedule, and the day out of days are all generated from the board, so a change to one strip flows to all three. Our stripboard template follows the same layout for spreadsheet users, and the blog walks through how to read a stripboard line by line.
Storiara's schedule has a stripboard view where you drag scenes or shots into shoot days. Grouping scenes by location is up to you as you place them.